Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney speaks with reporters Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House.
Donald Trump’s claims that the White House transcript of a presidential phone call to Ukraine doesn’t really say what it says are no longer operative. The president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, let the cat out of the cellophane bag by publicly blurting out the truth.
Sure, Mulvaney said Trump held up nearly $400 million Congress appropriated for Ukraine to force President Volodymyr Zelensky into finding a Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer server hidden somewhere in Ukraine that Trump believes could blow a secret Democratic conspiracy against him wide open.
“Absolutely, no question about that. But that’s it, and that’s why we held up the money,” Mulvaney said. “We do that all the time with foreign policy... I have news for everybody. Get over it! There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.”
Mulvaney’s public confession immediately made life much more difficult for Republicans by publicly describing an impeachable “quid pro quo”—a president unconstitutionally abusing his powers by using U.S. tax dollars to extort unlawful foreign interference to benefit his own election.
It also raises serious questions about the mental health of the president of the United States by focusing national attention on a truly crazy rightwing conspiracy theory Trump appears to believe. It’s about a mythical DNC server that could prove once and for all Vladimir Putin, Trump’s best friend in world politics, is totally innocent of all charges that Russia ever interfered in the 2016 election to elect Trump.
Life on the Lunatic Fringe
Here’s the shocking truth according to Trump and other regular consumers of rightwing conspiracies spread on lunatic fringe websites: Russia was framed. All those attacks on democracy were an inside job. It started with corrupt Ukrainians trying to make Russia look bad for invading their country. They conspired with U.S. Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and the DNC. Those diabolical Democrats cleverly hacked into their own computers during the campaign to steal and widely publicize their own politically damaging emails. Corrupt FBI agents hired CrowdStrike, a leading national cybersecurity firm, to fabricate evidence pinning all those crimes on Russia. They fooled Robert Mueller into indicting 13 employees working for a Russian “troll farm” and 12 Russian military intelligence officers. Then, CrowdStrike covered up their evil plot by hiding the DNC server containing all the explosive evidence somewhere in Ukraine. Sometimes, Trump tells rallies Clinton’s server with her missing emails could be there, too.
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I know that paragraph sounds loony. But go back and read the White House transcript of Trump’s telephone call. Trump wants Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to help Zelensky find that smoking DNC computer server. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, both Republicans, sent a letter urging Barr to investigate the same ridiculous conspiracy to sabotage Trump’s campaign in 2016 and smear Russia. With Trump openly soliciting foreign interference in U.S. elections, Johnson and Grassley added an ironic admonition: “Such allegations of corruption deserve due scrutiny, and the American people have a right to know when foreign forces attempt to undermine our democratic processes.”
It’s understandable the House impeachment investigation centers on Trump’s pressure on Zelensky to open a criminal investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. It’s a brazen abuse of the presidency for Trump’s personal political benefit. Neither Biden has ever been accused of wrongdoing in Ukraine (except by Trump), but if Biden is the Democratic nominee in 2020, Trump would love to joyfully smear him for being under criminal investigation and lead chants of “Lock him up!”
The nutty conspiracy theory Trump also wanted Zelensky to investigate as a “favor” is convoluted and difficult to explain, not to mention totally insane. But the greatest danger from the Trump presidency for the entire world is Trump’s continuing alliance, publicly and privately, with Russia. What House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the president to his face is true. With Trump, all roads really do lead to Putin. That’s certainly worthy of an article of impeachment as well.
The issue has become even more urgent with Trump’s sudden withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, conveniently fulfilling Putin’s fondest dream by making Russia the dominant outside power in the Middle East. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can write all the op-eds he wants condemning Trump for abandoning Kurdish allies in Syria to slaughter and leaving “the American people and homeland less safe” by emboldening our enemies. All those words will be meaningless if Senate Republicans obediently do what Trump keeps predicting and refuse to seriously consider all the mounting evidence of his unconstitutional assault on our democracy.
No one really knows why Trump keeps betraying his own country to serve Putin. But it’s time for his Republican supporters to stop pretending that’s acceptable for an American president.
